The Rudolf Steiner Archive

8. Friedrich Nietzsche in the Light of Spiritual Science

[ 1 ] Anyone who sets out to describe the relationship between modern intellectual life and the theosophical view of life cannot overlook one figure, and that is Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche stands as a great enigma in the cultural development of the present day. He has undoubtedly made a deep impression on all our thinking contemporaries. For some, he was a kind of leader; for others, a figure who must be fought with the utmost intensity. He has shaken many to their core and left behind many powerful results of his work. An extensive body of literature has been published on Nietzsche, and today one can hardly open a newspaper—this was even more the case a few years ago—without coming across the name Nietzsche somewhere, or finding his way of thinking directly quoted through his sentences and thoughts, or some other reference to him. Friedrich Nietzsche has become deeply rooted in the very fabric of our age. Even to a mere observer of his life, he stands out as a phenomenon.

[ 2 ] He came from a Protestant parsonage. Born in 1844, he already showed a keen interest in all religious matters in the most open and uninhibited way while attending high school. Some notes from his high school days reveal not only a precocious boy, but also a person who, with flashes of genius, shed light on many areas of religious inquiry. And when he entered university, he was not only interested in his major to the extent that he was among the most outstanding students, but he was also interested in the general problems of human development. Even in his youth, he achieved much in the field of philology—more than others could achieve in a lifetime. Before he earned his doctorate, he received a call to Basel. His teacher Ritschl was asked whether he could recommend that Friedrich Nietzsche take up a chair in Basel. The famous philologist replied that he could only recommend Nietzsche, for Nietzsche knew everything that he himself knew. And when he was already a professor and wanted to take his doctoral exam, he was told: “We can’t really examine you!” — Nietzsche, the associate professor, had been awarded a doctorate; so it stands on the diploma! This is a sign of how deeply his intellect was respected. Then he made an acquaintance that was decisive for his entire life. He became acquainted with Schopenhauer’s philosophy, into which he immersed himself so deeply that he made Schopenhauer’s personality—rather than the philosophy itself—his guide and leader, so that he saw Schopenhauer as his educator.

[ 3 ] A second important acquaintance was that with Richard Wagner. These two encounters gave rise to the first phase of Friedrich Nietzsche’s intellectual life. This happened in a very personal way. When Nietzsche was a young professor in Basel, he traveled as often as he could—at times every Sunday—to Triebschen near Lucerne. At that time, Richard Wagner was working on *Siegfried*. There, in the spirit of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, most of Wagner’s works and the deepest problems of intellectual life were discussed with the young Nietzsche. Wagner often said that he could find no better interpreter than Friedrich Nietzsche. If we consider the work *The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music*, we will find that through it Richard Wagner’s art is cast in such a light that it immediately appears as a cultural-historical achievement that shines across the centuries, indeed millennia. Rarely has such an intimate relationship existed as that between the younger student and the older master, who, in the most inspired manner, so to speak, came to know his own ideas anew—ideas that bubbled forth in rich abundance within him—as they met him from the outside, so to speak, in the full scope of their effect through the figure of a friend, enabling him thereby to place them in the proper light. It was a phenomenon of an unprecedented kind. Happy was Wagner, who could say that he had found an understanding soul, as few in the world have; no less happy was Nietzsche, who looked back to the primeval age of ancient Greece, of which he believed that people at that time still created divinely, unlike in the era he calls the decadent one. In Richard Wagner he saw a resurrection of the rarest kind, a man who possessed within himself a spiritual content so pure as is rarely found in human life.

[ 4 ] It was not until 1889 that much began to be written about Nietzsche. Those who repeat his words did not begin to engage with his works until after that time. But those who were already studying Nietzsche around 1889 knew that during the Wagner period—that is, until about 1876—he had shone like a comet, standing out alongside Richard Wagner, only to be almost forgotten thereafter. He was still talked about only in the smallest of circles. He then wrote his work *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* (1883), through which he became well-known again. Then a text of his appeared, through which he seemed to shatter everything he had previously regarded as his own. That was *The Case of Wagner* (1888). Through this, he became well-known again. Those who studied Nietzsche divided into two camps. Georg Brandes gave lectures on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen. Thus, Nietzsche had not only become a university professor in his very early years—a position he, however, soon had to give up for health reasons—but he was also honored to be the subject of university lectures. This news likely brought some comfort to his troubled soul, but it could no longer save him from the impending madness. Then, however, came the news that Nietzsche had fallen irrevocably into madness. Such was the framework of his external life.

[ 5 ] As I have already mentioned, his first work was *The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music*. It arose from a rare immersion in Schopenhauer’s philosophy and from his deep engagement with art, as it appeared to him in the works of Richard Wagner. Anyone who wishes to understand what this text signifies as the dawn of Nietzsche, and who also wishes to understand his life’s journey, must interpret it from a threefold perspective. First, one must interpret it in light of his time, with which Nietzsche lived intimately. I myself have attempted to portray Nietzsche objectively in this manner. Second, one can portray him as a being who emerges from his personality. Here he presents one of the most interesting psychological, indeed psychiatric, problems. I have also attempted to portray this in an article on Friedrich Nietzsche published in a medical journal. Third, one can portray him from the standpoint of the spiritual worldview. From this third standpoint, his relationship to theosophy becomes apparent. This is what we wish to consider today.

[ 6 ] Even his first work, *The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music*, provides important insights from a theosophical perspective, from the standpoint of a spiritual view of the world. Our age is the age of the fifth root race of humanity, preceded by two others that had to develop entirely different faculties than our root race. Our fifth root race is primarily tasked with developing human intellectual and mental life. The preceding root race is the Atlantean, which lived on the continent that now lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. These people had not yet developed reason or intellectuality, but rather had to develop memory. And one of these preceding root races was the Lemurian. This race still stood at the stage of the life of imagination.

[ 7 ] Intellectual life is what our root race must develop. For a number of centuries now, European humanity in particular has been engaged in developing this intellectual power, this power of reason. Our great philosophers, up to and including Kant and Schopenhauer, are the ones who stand entirely within this developmental movement of our root race. For them, the great problem became the question: What does human thought mean, and how can human beings come to know anything? For them, these questions became the great enigmas of existence. Now, however, something quite peculiar is occurring for our root race. The thought that the philosophers brought to its highest development has, so to speak, been detached from its native soil in our time. In the purest and most magnificent way, our time has developed thought in science in relation to external technical life. But these thoughts—or rather, these concepts—have torn us away from nature. Human thought is but an image of something far higher, which we discussed in the preceding lectures; it is a shadow, an image of the spiritual world. Thought is a spiritual entity. Modern times have developed the life of thought on a grand and mighty scale; but they have forgotten that this thought is nothing other than the shadow-image of spiritual life. This life, so to speak, sends the spiritual forces into us, and then the idea comes to us. The origin of thought, of the idea, was therefore a riddle, especially for nineteenth-century philosophy. For it, thought, the idea itself, became an illusion. People have forgotten that thought originates in the spirit, as Jakob Böhme says. When, in more recent times, attempts were made to seek the original sources of existence nonetheless, to penetrate to that original source which had been lost and of which it was no longer known that it originates in the spirit, it could only be found, in the sense of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, in the irrational, blind will; whereas thought, on the other hand, is nothing other than an illusion presented to us by our world of ideas. Thus, the world became idea on the one hand, and will on the other. But neither originated in the spirit anymore, only in mere appearance. How could it be otherwise than that this philosophy, running along materialistic lines, sought at least one bearer of the spirit in an element immediately found in the world by any unbiased observer, where the spirit as such exists only in the form of a blind will, an outgrowth of nature? That is precisely the personality. It was true that people had forgotten that there is something spiritual in personality; but personality as such could not be denied. In Schopenhauer’s philosophy, at least the one—the spiritual human personality—was recognized as the highest; the personality that stands out through its genius or through its piety or holiness and represents, as it were, a stage of development within the rest of humanity. Thus Schopenhauer was harsh and portrayed average people as nature’s mass-produced goods; yet from the dark drive of nature, individual great personalities crystallize. This view influenced Nietzsche.

[ 8 ] But something else was also at work within him. Through thoughts and ideas, we can never learn anything about what surges within the irrational will. In music, Schopenhauer finds the true essence and weaving of the chaos of the primal drives. Thus, for Schopenhauer, it was not possible to penetrate through this illusory world of imagination into the essence that expresses itself in the will; rather, the essence of music became for him a solution to the riddle of the world. Anyone familiar with the questions of mysticism knows how one might come to the view that music offers a solution to the riddle of the world. Music exists not only on the plane we call the physical or sensory world, but also in the higher worlds. When we ascend through the world of the soul into the higher spiritual worlds, we hear something of a higher music. Not the music we perceive on the physical plane; for this is not to be understood as an allegory, but as reality: the movement of the stars in the cosmos, the growth of every flower, the feelings of humans and animals appear as a sounding word! The occultist therefore says: Human beings only experience the world’s mysteries when the mystical word, which is present in things, speaks to them. What Schopenhauer discovered is an expression of a higher reality, something that has a far greater significance than what he understood by it; for in his view, it resonates only in the physical ear. We call Manas the principle that transcends time and reaches into the eternal. This Manas finds its physical expression in the sounds of music that reach us from the external world. Schopenhauer expressed something entirely correct, and Nietzsche took up this thought. With all the richness of his spirit, he sensed that whoever wishes to express the world’s mysteries through mere language cannot do so in the same way that the master of sounds can express the world’s mysteries. And so Friedrich Nietzsche, just like Schopenhauer, sees in musical expression the expression of the higher mysteries of the world. Thus, the path was also laid out for them to the primeval times of the ancient Greeks, where art, religion, and science were still a single whole, where in the mystery temples the mystery priests—who were scientists and artists—presented the fate of humanity and the entire world to the soul in powerful images. When we look into the temple, we find depicted the fate of the god Dionysus. This was the solution to the riddle of the world. But Dionysus had descended into matter and been dismembered, and the human spirit is called upon to redeem him, buried in matter, and lead him up into new glory. By seeking his divine nature within himself, man awakens the god within himself, and this awakening is the awakening of the god who has found a kind of tomb in the lower nature. This great destiny of the world was presented to the mystics not only sensually but also in a magnificent spiritual way. That was the primal drama of ancient Greece. We reach back to distant times here, and from this core springs that which became later Greek drama. The drama of Aeschylus and Sophocles was merely art; yet it had emerged from temple art. Art, science, and religion had branched off from temple art. Whoever looks back to these primordial times sees, at the root, something deeper from which the human conception of life and the shaping of life emerged. The living god Dionysus was the great figure of the Greek mysteries. Nietzsche did not recognize this within the Wagner circle, but he sensed it.

[ 9 ] It was a great, dark premonition, and from it arose his conception of the nature of the Greeks before Socrates. In those days, man was not one-sided; rather, the Dionysian man drew from the fullness of life. And because everything is imperfect, the Greeks created redemptive religion and wisdom, and later also redemptive art. Thus, to Nietzsche, what later appeared as art seemed merely a reflection of the ancient art he calls the Dionysian. This art still encompassed the whole human being—not just the imagination in a one-sided way, but all spiritual powers. Later, art was merely a reflection.

[ 10 ] Thus, the two concepts of the Dionysian and the Apollonian emerge in his works. Through them, he senses the origin of all artistic life and of the language through which the ancient Greeks expressed themselves. It was a language that was, at the same time, music. The drama was performed in the center, surrounded by the chorus, which depicted life and death in powerful sounds.

[ 11 ] Others who were also intimately familiar with the Wagner circle have depicted this fate in even greater depth. You will find it portrayed, particularly in the spirit of the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the book *The Sanctuaries of the Orient* by Schuré. What Nietzsche merely sensed, Edouard Schuré depicted not merely from the imagination, but from spirituality. It is what Nietzsche wanted but did not achieve. On this basis, the entire materialistic mindset of our time became a great enigma for him: How did humanity, in that era when it declared itself a mystery of the world, come to this dry, materialistic age? For others, this might have been a dry puzzle of reason; for Nietzsche, however, it became a matter of the heart—something others seek to address and resolve with reason, intellect, and imagination. Nietzsche was fused with his time just as parents are fused with their children. Yet he could not rejoice in his time, but only suffer. This is what Nietzsche could do: suffer; but not rejoice. Therein lies the solution to the Nietzsche problem.

[ 12 ] In Wagner, he saw the renewer of ancient Greek art, which expresses the highest mysteries through sound. The old man was to ascend to the superman, to the divine man. For this, one needed a man who rose above the average measure of humanity. And Schopenhauer came just at the right time. According to Schopenhauer, the average person was, after all, a mass-produced commodity. Man became a spiritual and soulful being, not of the earth but floating above it, and dramatic music was used as the means to transcend humanity. No one wrote as reverently about Richard Wagner as Friedrich Nietzsche did in his essay “Wagner in Bayreuth” in 1876. But the everyday had become something deeply despicable to him. That is why he also fought against what David Friedrich Strauss had expressed in his work “The Old and the New Faith.”

[ 13 ] There is another text from the early 1870s, a text without which one cannot understand Nietzsche at all. This text reveals that Nietzsche foresaw the problem of our time—which we recently called the Tolstoy problem—just as he foresaw the great Greek problem. He sensed that our time, which is now passing, is lacking something. For it is in the external forms that birth and death reign eternally. We have seen how every plant lives in its form between birth and death, how entire peoples pass away between birth and death, how the most magnificent works succumb to birth and death. But we have also seen how something remains, something that overcomes birth and death, that shapes and constantly reshapes, that allows the old to rise again in ever-new incarnations. That which the seed of a plant carries over into a new plant and which reappears there—this life is what Leo Tolstoy has portrayed.

[ 14 ] And yet again, our present human race is embodied in forms that are subject to birth and death. We are rushing toward a moment that will recognize life itself; Nietzsche had recognized that our age suffers from the contemplation of forms—not only in the natural sciences, but also in history. It was in this spirit that he wrote his significant treatise on the benefits and harms of history, on the historical disease. People go back to the most distant prehistoric times and seek to observe the beginnings of culture, from people to people, from nation to nation, from state to state. And yet birth and death live on in all of these. By filling ourselves with historical knowledge, we kill the life we have within us. We kill that which lives within us in eternal presence. The more we fill ourselves with the memory of history, the more we kill the will to live within us. If we look back and consider what this means, we see that we can only find something by directly observing human life, by observing ourselves. In this way, we draw closer to a new future.

[ 15 ] Nietzsche points to this new cultural epoch, which we must regard as the age of form and shape. This is what weaves and lives within Nietzsche. He believed in the art of Richard Wagner, believing he saw in it a renewal of life, a new Renaissance. Wagner was much more realistic than Nietzsche. He was entirely of his time; he told himself that the artist cannot take the third step before the first. And when Nietzsche came to Bayreuth in 1876, he saw something strange. He saw that the ideal he had formed of Wagner was too grand, that it was greater than what Wagner could fulfill. Just as Nietzsche had a dim inkling of the emergence of Greek tragedy from the age of the mysteries and of our entire era from primeval times, so too did he have a sense that a future culture, one not built solely upon the intellect, must arise from the spiritual powers still slumbering within human beings today. He sensed this, and he confused it with what was already there. He believed that the great mystery of the future had already been solved in the present. His objection to Socrates was that, through his influence, our culture had become one-sided, that it had split, on the one hand, into a culture of the intellect and, on the other, into a movement of the emotions. That is why he also mocks Socrates and opposes the Socratic culture, the culture of the intellect.

[ 16 ] When Wagner’s works of art confronted him in Bayreuth, he became unfaithful—though not truly unfaithful, for he had never really seen Wagner; rather, he had seen in Wagner what he himself had dreamed of as an ideal of the future. Then Nietzsche said to himself: I have seen something wrong. — Nietzsche the man thus became unfaithful to the young Nietzsche, and the harsh words are directed not so much against Wagner as against what he himself had been in his youth as a Wagner admirer. One cannot really be another’s opponent; one can only be one’s own opponent. “I feel all my youthful ideals compromised,” that is how he felt. He stood amidst the ruins of a worldview. He had to look for something else. And that became the “New Enlightenment.” What he had previously rejected, he now wanted to inspire and bring to life. He wanted to strike life out of the dead matter as science treats it. Now he himself became a student of form, of the outer shape that eternally passes us by in birth and death.

[ 17 ] And now let us grasp the profound theosophical truth that three things exist in the world: the outer form, which is subject to birth and death, which arises and passes away, reappears anew, and rushes from form to form throughout life; then life, which is the expression of the soul. The soul breaks through the form to be reborn in a new form. And let us grasp a third: consciousness in its various degrees. Every stone, every plant, and, at the higher levels, every human being possesses consciousness. We thus have three things in the world: form, life, and consciousness. This triad is the expression of a physical world, a soul world, and a spiritual world.

[ 18 ] This is the wisdom that will gradually be revealed to the world once more. It is also the ancient wisdom of the mysteries, which Nietzsche sensed dimly in his heart but could not articulate clearly, which caused him suffering, and which he longed for as a new life that was to emerge from our culture. Now he himself was entangled in the natural sciences. He had no eye for the fact that it is consciousness that lives in life and ascends to higher and higher forms. That is the course of the world. Consciousness extracts from form that which is worthy of being drawn out, toward higher formation. Through this, we have a development of things from form to form, from stage of life to stage of life, where life remains and the forms and figures display an elevated development. He no longer understood the consciousness that develops and enters into ever higher and higher forms. Nietzsche now saw only the form; he did not understand the driving force that appears in ever more elevated forms.

[ 19 ] Thus it came to pass that he recognized the return of things and beings, but did not realize that they reincarnate in ever higher and higher forms. Therefore, he taught the “return of the same.” He no longer knew that consciousness returns on higher levels. This is the idea to which he was led by natural science: Just as we are now, just as we sit here, we have been here countless times before and will be here again. This must seem obvious to the thinker who does not know that consciousness does not return in the same form, but in an elevated form. That was the second stage of Nietzsche’s development.

[ 20 ] The third stage is one that must be characterized by the fact that, despite everything, there was still an intellectual life within Nietzsche’s soul, which he was, however, unable to bring to the fore within such a worldview of mere form. Although he did not know that the higher realms of existence were closed to him, the powerful urge toward these higher realms of existence certainly lived within him. Humanity has evolved in form, from animal to human. But this evolution cannot be complete. Just as the worm evolved into a human, so must humanity continue to evolve. This gave rise to the idea of the Übermensch. This Übermensch is what humanity will become in the future. Compare him with the corresponding mystical idea, and you will find that they are closely related. The urge in human nature, which is also expressed within us, is the urge toward spiritualization, so that even now, at the depths of the soul, one can find the God-man who reaches down from the future world, and Nietzsche appears as the great spiritual ideal toward which he strives.

[ 21 ] If one considers not merely form and shape, but also life and consciousness, soul and spirit, then this Übermensch appears in his true form; then he appears as the whole human being who will hasten toward the higher spheres of existence. For Nietzsche, this idea was present in its embryonic form, but he could express it only in the words of a natural scientist. Just as humanity has developed from a thousand and a thousand forms, so too must it develop into higher forms to become the superman. When Nietzsche wrote *The Birth of Tragedy*, he stood before the gate of the Greek mysteries; he stood before the gate of the Temple of Dionysus, but he could not unlock the entrance gate. Then he struggled on and wrote “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: once again he stood before the gate of the temple—and could not unlock it. That is the tragedy of his life, of his fate. So when one stands as an individual human being, as an “I” suffering and feeling along with one’s time, facing the soul-spiritual realm, then something very special happens to this “I.” Anyone familiar with the phenomena of the astral world knows what must come to pass for this human “I” when it stands in this spirit-filled way before a multitude of riddles and gates that do not open to it: Before every question in the soul-spiritual world stands something that is like the shadow of that question, appearing as a pursuer of the soul. This will at first seem somewhat peculiar to the materialist. But the one who stood before Christianity and did not know how it would develop further, the one who stood before our philosophy, before the materialism of our time, and longed for a new Dionysus but could not give birth to him from within himself—that one stood there as before the shadows of the past. Thus, for Nietzsche—though within what we call the astral world—the Antichrist stood beside the figure of Christ, the immoralist beside the moralist. Beside what he knew as the philosophy of our time stood its negation. That was what tormented him like a persecutor of his ego.

[ 22 ] Read Nietzsche’s later works, his *Will to Power* and his *Antichrist*, in which he portrays the specter of the critique of Christianity and the critique of philosophy within his nihilism. He cannot escape these things; the morality of our time holds him back—a morality that cannot escape good and evil, that refuses to recognize karma, even as it strives for it. Finally, the eternally changing form appeared to him as the return of the eternally identical form. The fourth work was never completed. He wanted to call it “Dionysus or the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence.” Thus, only the urge of the solitary self toward the Übermensch remained.

[ 23 ] Nietzsche should have looked into the human self and recognized the divine man; then what he longed for would have become clear to him. But as it was, it seemed unattainable to him. It was merely the violent urge within him to grasp this essence. He called this his will to power, his striving toward the Übermensch. With the full intensity of his being, he found a lyrical expression in *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* that is soul-uplifting, soul-cheering, and equally soul-consuming, and at times paradoxical. This is the cry of modern man for the God-man, for wisdom, but it leads only to the will to wisdom, to the will to power. Lyrically magnificent things can emerge from this urge. But something that can seize man in his deepest inner being and lead him up to these heights cannot emerge from this urge. Thus, the figure of Nietzsche is the last great empathy with materialism—the man who suffered tragically, who perished tragically because of the materialism of the 19th century, and who points with all his longing toward the new mystical age. Meister Eckhart says, “God is dead,” so that I too may die to the world and all created things and become God. Nietzsche also says this in a prose aphorism: “If there were a God, who could bear not to be God?” Thus Nietzsche says, there is no God! He did not grasp Goethe’s saying:

If the eye were not like the sun,
It could never behold the sun;
If God’s own power did not dwell within us,
How could the divine delight us?

[ 24 ] What had become so clear to him in our time, and what he perceived as suffering, was bound to consume him. I do not mean to say that his illness had anything to do with his spiritual life; what he longed for but could not attain was the theosophical worldview. He felt a longing for something he could not find. He himself expressed this in many of the tormented expressions of his life. That is why his last writings also contain a longing for the life he wants to conjure out of form, and then again a lyrical cry for the God-man in *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*. Then the shattering of everything that the present could not give him, which he sought to attempt in the work *The Will to Power* or in *The Eternal Return*, which remained only as fragments and have now been published from his estate. All of this lived within Nietzsche’s tragic personality in his final days, and shows how one can suffer in our time if one does not rise to a spiritual perspective. He expressed this himself in a poem, “Ecce Homo,” in which he presents the enigma of his own life to us:

Yes, I know where I come from!
Unsated, like a flame
I “glow and consume” myself.
Everything I touch becomes light,
Everything I leave behind becomes coal:
I am certainly a flame!